The Best AI Tools To Use In 2024: Features And Limitations

We all use AI tools in some capacity, whether we want to admit it or not. And we can’t afford not to. Otherwise, we might lose our competitive edge.

Listen, my purpose is not to replicate the gut-wrenching Black Mirror narrative about AI taking over the world. I’m instead admitting that the current status quo is:

“What generative AI productivity tools should we implement?” instead of “Should AI generate anything for our business”?

For these debates to spark less tension and countless tool trials, I curated a list of the 13 best AI tools for your business.

They’re curated based on my own testing experience and our collective experience as an AI tool trusted by over 100,000 users.

The AI tools list

• Time-tracking app: Timeular

• Chatbot: ChatGPT

• AI writing assistant & AI writing tool: Grammarly.GO, Jasper

• AI image generation: DallE, Midjourney

• AI video generation: Lumen5

• AI podcasting: Podcastle

• AI code writing: Github Copilot

• AI note-taking: AI fireflies

• HR & recruiting: Textio

• AI-powered sales: Gong.io

• AI customer support – Kustomer

• Automation creation: Zapier

Track productivity with Timeular, the most secure AI-powered time tracking tool

“I’ve doubled my revenue thanks to Timeular and managed to halve how much I work.“ Valdemar Alfred, Owner of Valdefar

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What are AI tools?

In this article, you can choose your new shiny AI productivity apps for content writing, coding, customer service, image and video generation, note-taking, and human resources. You’ll get to see their best features and their limitations.

But first, in true AI fashion, I have asked ChatGPT to find the definition of generative AI tools from credible sources and explain it to me.

Note that ChatGPT is currently the AI tool I use most after Timeular. I’ll get into details later on.

Essentially, an AI tool is a software app that uses AI algorithms to automate repetitive tasks and solve problems.

AI productivity tools can be used in multiple industries, from education to marketing to healthcare and finance, to analyze high volumes of data and automate tasks.

📌 You might find interesting:

• Best AI tools for business
• Best AI tools for productivity

The best AI tools by category

The best AI tool for time tracking and productivity

Timeular

Timeular is an AI time tracker that comes with the perks of a physical tool, too.

It has a very interesting blend of AI capabilities, removing the pain of manually entering data in a timesheet, with a time-tracking physical cube to help you form the habit of tracking.

This productivity tracker is characterized by ease of use and security at the core. Let’s explore Timeular’s best capabilities as an AI tool and why it shines from all others:

Timeular’s key features

• Automatic time entry suggestions: Its AI generates time entries based on your Outlook or Google calendar events, so you don’t need to manually accept, edit, and fix your time entry at the end of the day;
• Automatic time tracking: Allows you to create timesheets automatically based on saved app usage and visited websites;
• Smart productivity insights that help you identify work habits, procrastination patterns, and when you are most productive and unproductive;
• 100% privacy and GDPR compliance: Unlike other time tracking tools, Timeular stores your data locally on your computer, not in the cloud;
• Anti-surveillance features: Timeular postpones a manager’s access to tracked data until midnight so that employees track honestly and do not feel spied on.

Other notable features of Timeular are:

• Its unique time-tracking cube;

• Automatic time reporting system to extract valuable insights with ease;

• 3000+ integrations with tools of your choice;

• Budget notifications or alerts and non-billable and billable time tracking in one click;

• Features such as tracking overtime and leave tracking for balanced workloads and accurate reports;

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Top AI Chatbot

ChatGPT

You must already know ChatGPT.

This tool was the most utilized generative AI platform out of all other machine learning models. It had 14.6B visitors from September 2022 to August 2023 – according to a study made by Writerbuddy. That represents over 60% of the analyzed traffic.

Here are some use cases this AI chatbot told me you might have used it for in the last year:

draft a difficult email to renegotiate prices with a customer, write a peculiar joke or poem for a team event, write code, help in ideating for a blog post, and even train the sales team with role plays.

ChatGPT’s key features:

• Simple, intuitive user interface in the form of a chat, which makes it a smooth user experience for any type of user;
• Emulates conversational experiences through its voice mode ( available only on mobile );
• A high degree of adaptability and a large database, which makes it versatile for multiple topics;
• It supports multiple languages, currently over 50.
• Unlike other conversational AI tools that generate predefined responses, ChatGPT can contextually generate relevant output based on natural language prompts.

ChatGPT limitations

• Its responses can be inaccurate or biased – the output generated comes from the user’s inputs, too, which impacts the validity of its responses;
• The free version, particularly, can be buggy and crashes, but the paid version has usage caps, too, as some users report on the OpenAI community;
• Its output may seem illogical or generic, as it lacks human logic and attention to detail;
• Despite its built-in security measures, it may cause some major security threats.

What are the Best AI tools for writing?

GrammarlyGo

GrammarlyGo is an innovative content creation AI tool you must have heard of.

This is one of the productivity tools that has metamorphosed in recent years by evolving beyond simply correcting grammar mistakes or grammatical errors. It incorporated generative AI features.

It offers a broad range of functionalities, such as composing, rewriting, and generating drafts based on prompts. It even includes creating new versions of written text with a different tone of voice, clarity, or length. GrammarlyGo can process and understand language at an advanced level, enabling its users to write in a unique style and voice.

GrammarlyGO’s key features

• Customization of writing style and voice to adjust to your communication guidelines;

• AI writing assistance and contextual understanding: generates content, improves existing texts, and ideates for topics almost instantly, based on your prompts or suggestions;

• Automatic summarization of long blocks of text; it can generate content for an email so you can be concise;

• It can integrate with various platforms and lets you write and edit in your usual workspaces, such as Google Docs or WordPress;

• Built-in plagiarism checker that flags specific sentences and even references the source.

GrammarlyGo limitations

• Depending on your plan, you have access to a limited number of prompts per month (e.g., for a free plan, you have 100, whereas for a paid plan, you have 1000);

• You won’t have unlimited words, either, but a maximum of 150.000 per month;

• The only language currently supported is English;

• GrammarlyGO is still in the beta version, which requires diligent checks on your text prompt.

Jasper

Another tool that helps you skip the blank page phase in content creation is Jasper.

It is one of the most searched-for AI productivity apps out there. It specializes in long-form content. That can be a blog post, an outline, a script, etc. You can find product description templates, too.

Jasper’s key features

• Has three distinct modes (Focus, Chat, and Power Mode) – helping you keep distractions away with Jasper and quickly give it text prompts;
• You can prompt it with your voice, too, through its chat function;
• Access to dozens of templates to get you started and access to the internet to research while sharing sources;
• Though it’s a content creation tool, it even generates images with artificial intelligence;
• Multiple integrations, including Grammarly or Surfer SEO, are needed for high ranks in search engines.

Jasper limitations

• It has a plagiarism detection feature powered by Copyscape, but it requires an additional fee on top of Jasper, which is not ideal;

• As content writing requires research, Jasper falls short of technical writing, and you’d need to edit and diligently research the topics yourself to ensure accuracy.

The top-rated image-generation AI software

DALL-E 2

Developed by the mother company OpenAI, DALL-E 2 is an image generation tool that produces fantastical and realistic images based on natural language text prompts.

Interestingly, the origin of its name comes from the artist Salvador Dalí and the animated character WALL-E.

Anyhow, this AI tool showcases AI’s capability to understand and visualize concepts, producing a wide range of images in multiple formats.

DALL-E 2’s key features

• DALL-E 2 can produce compelling visuals that can be used in advertising, gaming and entertainment, e-commerce, or even education and art;

• has a good style mimicking feature by generating images in the style of certain artists, art movements, or based on an image as input;

• DALL-E can generate images across various formats, from technical PDFs to poetry;

• robust image editing and variation generation – alters an image you give it and generates multiple variations based on the modified text prompts.

DALL-E 2 limitations

• inconsistencies in its image generation feature, as DALL-E sometimes creates images inconsistent with the text prompt, particularly in textual variations;

• the image quality is, at times, of lower resolution and blurry instead of sharp;

• there may be copyright infringement concerns, as this artificial intelligence tool generates images that closely resemble an existing image or, even more, with specific artwork.

Midjourney

Midjourney is an AI image generator that can turn your vision into images you might not have imagined possible, even if you reiterated thousands of prompts in Google Docs.

Or, maybe you could have?

Taking 4th place in the Writerbuddy study with 500.4M visitors from September 2022 to August 2023, I am almost certain many corners of the Internet have seen a Midjourney-generated image.

As its outputs are impressive, Midjourney has gained popularity among marketing agencies, and other businesses are experimenting with it.

This machine-learning tool created some product designs, brand imagery, marketing materials, and other images shared on social media posts.

Midjourney’s key features

• Midjourney has a powerful community of users on Discord, where users or beginners can gain best practices and speed up the learning curve. Its Discord community is the largest, with 17.5 million users, as of December 2023;

• compared to V3 AND V4, Version 5 allows for a wide variety of outputs, with better responsiveness to user inputs and better natural language processing;

• create images realistically, but with a very good blend of imaginary and artistic artwork characteristics and details ( especially in the V5 version).

Midjourney limitations

• Discord can be overwhelming for new users, so navigating Midjourney Discord can take some time, so users can feel discouraged from using the app;

• its prompting tool does not fully understand the context of the text prompts and focuses on creating aesthetically pleasing images. Therefore, you might be disappointed in the discrepancy between vision and output.

TIP: Read our post and find other top-notch AI tools for designers.

Good AI video creation tools

Lumen5

Lumen5 is a video creation tool that uses artificial intelligence to produce visually appealing videos. It’s primarily used to generate videos for marketing and social media purposes, but not only.

Its machine learning technology can also help in re-purposing video content for other uses, too. Due to its generative AI features and ease of use, anyone can create video content in minutes without any training with Lumen5.

Lumen5‘s key features

• has a comprehensive library of video clips, stock images, and audio files with music;

• makes video creation quick and easy to use for non-specialists in the field of video content;

• has a wide range of templates, colors, and fonts, which allows for brand consistency and creative expression;

• can turn blog posts, articles, or text into video content, saving time and effort;

• it can automatically create captions and add comments on videos;

• you can automatically create voiceovers with it, without using your voice, for an enhanced storytelling experience.

Lumen5 limitations

• its dependency on templates can be a disadvantage, limiting the potential for unique, animated videos or room for customization;

• Lumen5’s free plan has considerable limitations, such as the video resolution being 720p(whereas the paid plan is 1080p) and your video having a watermark ( this would require using a tool with a magic eraser)

TIP: Read our blog and find out why Lumen5 is one of the best artificial intelligence tools for marketing.

Podcastle

Podcastle is a game-changer in audio and video production. It offers a suite of AI-powered tools tailored to simplify content creation while maintaining studio-quality standards. 

One of Podcastle’s most prominent features is the AI voice generator, which revolutionizes the audio creation process by generating a digital replica of the user’s voice. It eliminates the need for manual recording and allows users to effortlessly produce audiobooks, podcasts, and other types of audio content.

But Podcastle extends beyond voice generation. It is an all-in-one place for creators where you can find AI-powered enhancement tools, recording features, a hosting hub, a royalty-free music and sound-effect library, a video editor and recorder, a text-to-speech converter, collaboration features, and so much more. The best part is that all of it is wrapped up in an intuitive interface, making it easy for beginners and professionals to navigate.

Podcastle’s key features

• HD audio recording and 4K video recording studio ensure that you capture every detail of your content with unparalleled clarity. 

• Easy-to-use audio editor powered with a bunch of AI features that make audio editing a breeze
• Revoice feature that allows you to create a digital voice copy of your own voice and use it to produce audio without manually recording it 
• One-click background noise remover, auto-leveling feature, audio assistant, and other AI enhancements 

• Podcastle’s Hosting Hub allows you to seamlessly host and manage your audio shows 

• Collaborative capabilities that facilitate teamwork and enable multiple users to collaborate on the same project concurrently.

Podcastle limitations 

• It may not fully satisfy the needs of users seeking advanced music production capabilities.

• The AI transcription tool may exhibit limitations in accurately transcribing languages other than English.

• Podcastle’s functionality relies on a stable internet connection, which may pose challenges in areas with limited connectivity.

The best AI code generator

GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is a code generation app that auto-suggests code completions to developers once they type. Simpler said you don’t have to write code, as this AI assistant will do it for you. This tool is one of the best AI tools for small businesses that are looking to improve developers’ productivity by ensuring efficiency.

It’s available in multiple languages, and it’s built by OpenAI Codex, another AI-powered coding software.

GitHub Copilot’s key features

• Versatile across a broad range of programming languages and frameworks, making it handy for various developers to complete tasks;

• Through its contextual code completion feature, this generative AI software understands the context of the code written and produces relevant suggestions;

• Has many integrations with Visual Studio Code, Vim, Neovim, the JetBrains suite of IDEs, and others.

GitHub Copilot limitations

• It relies heavily on the training data it was fed with; therefore, the variety and accuracy of its output can be limited;

• Its users might have a slower learning curve to incorporate into the workflow, and Copilot needs time to generate outputs based on the user’s processes;

• Licensing is still a grey area, as there is code that might be copyrighted or not appropriately licensed.

The Best AI note-tasking and meeting assistant

Fireflies.ai

Fireflies is an AI meeting assistant for note taking that transcribes voices in real time. Essentially, it automatically creates meeting notes out of your calls. Due to its features, it’s considered one of the best AI productivity tools.

So, whether you have multiple client calls and need to return to your briefs, any price negotiation, or even long brainstorming sessions, you’ll have an automated assistant that captures your conversations in writing;

Insider fact/tip: The most interesting fact about Fireflies is that it participates with you on any call. Once you join a Google Meet or Zoom, Fred@Fireflies will join it, too. So, you’d better be careful what you’re singing out loud before anyone else joins.

Fireflies’s key features

• It integrates with your meeting tools, such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and more;

• AI-powered search option to review meetings quickly and identify key points or keywords;

• Uses an interesting machine learning technology – sentiment analysis – so you can identify positive, negative, or neutral parts of a call quickly;

• Smart summaries of meeting insights, next steps and highlights, and clickable timestamps.

• Text can be edited, commented on, or corrected;

• Share options with your client team by sending a link or scanning a QR code.

Fireflies limitations

• This AI assistant sometimes struggles to catch accents, dialects, or languages, and the transcription quality can be dissatisfying at times.

• Transcriptions of technical jargon can also have a degree of inaccuracy.

• The free version has limitations related to storage, which can be insufficient for some users.

Best AI tools for human resources, customer support, and sales

Textio

If you’re looking to align more with diversity and inclusion as one of your values and make it more visible in your hiring process, Textio can help.

This artificial intelligence tool is focused primarily on enhancing recruitment and removing biases from any hiring process. It guides performance review processes, too.

Textio’s key features

• Feature helping managers write unbiased and actionable performance feedback;

• Generates automatic suggestions in real-time on how diverse the hiring pipeline will be, based on what a hiring manager writes;

• Through a bias interruption, explains how a job post appeals to different groups;

• Integrates with most common HR tools;

Textio limitations

• Textio is currently available only in English;

• It doesn’t have a free plan, and pricing details are not available online; it might offer custom pricing, however.

Kustomer

If you’re familiar with all-time customer service complaints, such as unhelpful agents, long hold times, and hard-to-find information, and want to reduce them finally, an innovative tool such as Kustomer might be what you need.

Kustomer is a cloud-based AI-powered CRM with a unified system for managing customer support and interactions. It streamlines client interactions, automates your FAQs as well as chatbot replies, and aids you in providing service 24/7.

Can you already imagine those pain points removed just as background noise fades away when adding some AirPods? I can.

But let’s temper the overly optimistic perspective by seeing what this machine-learning platform excels in and where its limits are.

• Read also: Examples of artificial intelligence in business

Kustomer’s key features

• Aauto-translates information in 70+ languages and either automatically replies through the bot or transfers the chat to a native speaker;

• Can deploy bots across various platforms such as email, chat, and social media to automate routine tasks;

• Detects the tone of customers, anticipates wait time, and offers personalized suggestions to its interlocutors;

• Generates replies based on historical data due to its AI-powered capabilities.

Kustomer limitations 

• Steep learning curve, as Kustomer has extensive features and customization options;

• Might not be affordable for smaller or mid-sized organizations;

• Its AI feature is an add-on to the paid plan

Gong.io

Gong.io is a sales platform that’s revolutionized how sales teams operate, and while being on the market for a while, only recently has it adopted more artificial intelligence features.

Its main functionality is to analyze customer interactions and provide actionable feedback, helping sales teams refine their strategies and communication skills.

Gong.io’s key features

• Delivers insights into customer needs and preferences and aids in tailoring offers to enhance deal closures;

• Through conversation analytics, detects different topics in a call and stores them separately by tags;

• Automatically generates areas of improvement for the sales reps and a call summary;

• It integrates with 100+ 100+ applications, including popular tools like Zoom, Salesforce, and Microsoft Teams, making it a versatile addition to your sales process.

Gong.io limitations

• On Getapp.com, some user mentioned that it was difficult for their team to get onboarded into Gong.io. Therefore, you might have a steep learning curve;

• Sometimes the search functionality confuses users as, if they don’t have the exact name of a call, it may take a while to track it down in the search bar.

The Best tool for automation

Zapier

Zapier lets you automatically create any automation you need between your platforms of choice. It is a no-code app, but with the simplest coding logic, you’ll get machine-learning capabilities, too.

All you have to do is hop into the Zap builder and explain the automation you need, and you’ll get a custom workflow built for your use case.

An example of Zapier automation to increase your response time to customers is by having any sales messages received through your chat on the site directly sent to Slack so that you can reply right away.

Tip: check Zapier’s Tiktok; they share many use cases that could benefit you.

Zapier’s key features

• Instant automation generated with the simple if-then coding logic, suitable for any type of coding skills;

• Filtering feature, to run filters only when specific conditions are met;

• It integrates with 6871 platforms, so you’ll be able to create virtually any automation.

Zapier limitations

• Their free plan has considerable limitations on creating automation ( for example, the free plan allows only single-step automation);

• Not all integrations work smoothly, and for that reason, some users prefer native integrations with certain platforms.

Read also: The best software to automate repetitive tasks

What makes a good AI tool for you?

The pace at which AI tools are created is too hard to keep up with. With such frenzy and countless apps available, you need to save time and choose the best one for you among “the other tools” on the market.

Keep into account the following:

• Your objectives: Identify what you want to achieve with these AI productivity tools. Is it to drive sales, estimate costs better, or enhance operations? Then, such apps should directly contribute to your goals.
• The app’s capabilities: Simply check whether the tool has features that meet your needs. For instance, if you’re looking to enhance customer interactions, look for advanced natural language processing capabilities.
• Thorough testing: Use free trials or demos to test the tool’s functionality, but remember, it would be best for the direct users to test the machine AI productivity tools themselves.
• Easy navigation: It may already sound like a buzzword for a tool to have an intuitive user interface. Still, if you lose that from sight, your team may not use it or spend hours trying to build a seamless workflow.
• High scalability: Ensure your productivity tools can grow with your business, too, by handling higher workloads or data.
• Compatibility with current platforms: Ensure minimal disruptions and smoother adoption by choosing a tool that integrates easily with your current tech infrastructure.

Conclusion

Regardless of the AI model you choose to try from this list, the growth of these AI apps is ever-changing, and so is the entire business landscape.

You can start to automatically track time with Timeular’s precision to escape time-consuming tasks like manually tracking time or use image generators like DallE or Midjourney.

Each tool in the list contributes to automating mundane tasks, so review your objectives and thoroughly test a tool’s capabilities, scalability, and how it merges into your workflow.

After all, you should reduce costs, speed up work, and increase efficiency and profitability.

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